


Reaching for Attention

by elizajane



Series: How She Loved You [1]
Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/F, Inconvenient Clothing, Inconvenient Flashbacks, Masturbation, Suffrage tracts, Unintentional Voyeurism, Young Lesbians FTW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-18
Updated: 2011-04-18
Packaged: 2017-10-18 08:08:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sybil Crawley is aware that her elders believe she’s naive. This is to her and Gwen Hastings’s advantage. Sybil POV. I went looking for some femmeslash with satisfying and explicit sexytimes and was frustrated in my search ... so gave up and wrote my own. If all goes well, this might be part one of a series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reaching for Attention

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to CrowGirl and Minerva for the beta and all around encouragement!

_When you think you've found something  
Worth holding on to  
Were you reaching for attention  
Hoping she would notice you? _

_~Dar Williams, “Troubled Times”_

There are mornings, sitting in the breakfast room, that Lady Sybil is caught without warning by a tidal surge of physical memory. More often then not, she is, in reality, surrounded by the members of her polite and civilly restrained family. Yet between one moment and the next, desire washes over her with such force that her eyes flutter shut momentarily and her breath catches in the back of her throat.

The first time it happened, she remembers her utter conviction that _everyone knew_. How could they, she wondered in mortification, possibly remain oblivious to the heat washing over her? The images so vivid in her head? How could her sister Mary, buttering toast with such precision across the linen tablecloth, not see in her eyes the reflection of Gwen’s gaze lingering there from the night before? Not sense the way those green eyes had pinned her breathless to the cotton bedspread without a single word. How could her sister Edith, picking with disinterest at her boiled egg, not understand from the flush creeping up from beneath Sybil’s collar how her skin had glowed in the early hours of the morning from the sensation of Gwen’s hands gripping her hips, insistent, with an authority Sybil had until that moment only fantasized about in stolen moments of solitude? How could her mother not divine, from the way Sybil’s mouth opened involuntarily to draw a shaking breath, how she had mewed, shameless with wanting, as she tasted first one and then another of Gwen’s taut nipples with her tongue and teeth? How could her father, glancing over the edge of his morning paper, fail to notice how her hand, resting on the tablecloth, trembled with the muscle memory of reaching down, reaching in, insistent, demanding, with Gwen’s hands tangled in her hair, pulling her closer.

And then, a heartbeat or two later, the surge is gone. On mornings such as this, she is left panting, weak-kneed (she imagines, sitting very still her high-backed chair) as the memories ebb, returning to the ocean of privacy that exists, cool and deep, at the center of her being.

In the seven months that have passed since, well, since she and Gwen first made love, she has learned to trust that no one around her will see or, if they happened to see, will fail to understand the way her world has shifted.

Gwen sees, of course. But then, Gwen is looking. Sybil catches her sometimes out of the corner of her eye, practicing the particular art of unobtrusiveness by which all the household staff move about Downton. Unobtrusiveness that borders on invisibility. Moving in and out of rooms where she reads or studies without causing her to look up from the pages of her book or the slant of her drafting table.

It is a skill Sybil has long admired, and one she has (she likes to think) learned to imitate over the years to her own advantage. Being ... unobtrusive in Downton often has its uses.

Yet she is conscious, now, that Gwen will never again be invisible to her, or her to Gwen.

* * *

In retrospect, it had been the non-invisibility of Gwen Hastings that first arrested Lady Sybil’s attention, half a dozen years before. Gwen had come to Downton when Sybil was just eleven years old, herself only a year or two older. Hired to replace a housemaid whom Sybil now only vaguely remembers – Jane? Joan? Jean? – who’d gone and engaged herself to a lad in the village. Or perhaps back home. Wherever “home” had been. Sybil had been absorbed in her child’s life then, heedless of the pairing and re-pairing of the adults around her.

Gwen, however, made an impression. In contrast to Anna, whose movements were so economical, practiced, precise, Gwen’s movements were all elbows and knees, taking up space. Sybil felt crowded by her presence, initially resented it when the young maid was tasked with making the bed, stoking the fire, dusting a room in which the youngest Crawley daughter had chosen to complete the essay her tutor had set for the afternoon. Not that she wasn’t professional. On the contrary, she left surfaces spotless, corners tucked under with mathematical precision. Yet in order to reach such an unremarkable end, the girl seemed to take up the same amount of space as entire dinner party of guests.

She moved ... _undemurely_ , young Sybil marveled. Yet all the while never pushing the boundaries of expected behavior so far that they broke; you only saw the bowed edges if you looked at her slant.

Or watched her as obsessively as Sybil had begun to.

It was Gwen’s ability to bend, yet skillfully not break, the expectations surrounding her that first caught young Sybil’s attention. It was in those early days that Sybil first began to cultivate the habit of watching the older girl whenever Gwen was in the room. _How does she do it?_ Sybil would wonder, peering over the edge of her book; pretending not to watch Gwen in the reflection of her dressing table mirror as the redhead brushed her long black hair before bed.

Gwen’s presence disturbed Sybil, but her absence was also oddly present. When she left the room, Sybil found the space suddenly contracted, grew dim. She would shiver and feel herself suddenly cast adrift momentarily unmoored from the present moment, until she could discipline herself to return.

Because Sybil was watching, she began to notice Gwen’s subtle insubordination. The flash of disobedience in her eyes when receiving orders that displeased her, though she never spoke back. The straightening of her spine in such a way discernible only to another who had felt the same tremors of rebellion.

Sybil had known the feeling of rebellion well, and had often wondered if Gwen felt a similar recognition when watching Sybil. Or whether Sybil, one of the daughters of the house, remained as invisible to Gwen as Gwen had once been to Sybil.

* * *

The question of invisibility was at least partially resolved one morning shortly after Sybil’s sixteenth birthday.

“Do you read?”

“I’m sorry, Milady?”

“I said, ‘do you read?’” the newly-sixteen-year-old Sybil was sitting on the window seat in her father’s library, reading a copy of Sylvia Pankhurst’s history of the woman suffrage movement. Her cousin Cynthia, an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union had written to her enthusiastically about Miss Pankhurst’s history. It sounded like a compelling and instructive read to Sybil, who had during the previous season made it her business to shadow Cynthia as much as possible, learning all she could about her cousin’s thrilling political adventures.

Wishing to avoid complicated conversations with her well-meaning (but, to Sybil’s mind, overly-cautious) father about the political theatre of the WSPU suffragists, she had written to Cynthia explaining the situation and requested a copy of the book. Cynthia (ever obliging when it came to involving her younger cousin in political matters) had promptly fulfilled the request and Sybil was now reading about the daring adventures of the infamous Pankhurst sisters with a sense of mature political perspicacity.

“Of course I can read.” Gwen, who had been polishing the silver on the mantelpiece huffed in what Sybil had learned to read as indignation.

“I meant – of course you _can_ read,” Sybil stumbled. How was one supposed to open friendly conversation with servants if it did not involve a request? She had no previous experience. Other than Nanny Theresa. But Nanny Theresa had been different, something more than a servant, and was in any event long gone from Downton. Married to a country doctor, or so Sybil’s mother had told her. “I meant to say, _do_ you read?”

Gwen turned to give her a side-long glance. “When I’ve the time.”

“I think you might like this book,” Sybil said, not entirely sure why she had started this conversation, certain she was not ready for it to end.

“Oh?” Gwen’s eyebrow climbed toward her white starched cap. “That one there? That you’d prefer your father not notice you’ve in the house?”

Sybil colored. “Is it that obvious?”

“Only to those of us that pay attention.” Gwen smiled, as if they shared a secret, and Sybil felt something warm and glowing and altogether uncomfortably powerful bloom in the center of her being. Gwen. Paying attention to her. This was both delicious and unbearable, though she couldn’t in that moment find words to explain why.

“Well. I think you’d like it.” She mumbled. “It’s about women and … and how we ought to be allowed to, well, work and vote and --” suddenly acutely aware of how foolish such a claim should sound to Gwen, who was up at five and worked until ten seven days a week.

Gwen came over to the window seat, polishing rag in one hand, and plucked the book from Sybil’s hand. She flipped it open to the title page.

“Aye, yes. Miss Pankhurst. Well. When you’ve finished your reading pass it along and let me have a look, you see? And I’ll tell you what I think.”

And she _winked_.

Sybil gaped, taking the book that Gwen slipped back into her hands. She didn’t know it then, but she’d just fallen completely, irrevocably, in lust.

* * *

It was, distastefully enough, Thomas the footman who (inadvertently) opened Sybil’s eyes to the possibility of love or lust that contravened the patterns she had been raised to expect. He was unaware of this, and Sybil never planned to enlighten him.

There was a house party. The usual guests, names and faces Sybil had known since her nursery days. She had been seated between a Lord Marston, who spoke of nothing but financial speculation, and Lord Rawlings who refused to believe a young lady would have a serious interest in the mechanical engineering of motorcars. Nevertheless, Sybil had been able to coax him into describing for her the operation of his recently-acquired Bentley. In this Sybil had been helped enormously by the engagement of Lord Acton across the table, who had shown considerable interest in the subject and had encouraged Marston into speaking without regard for the supposed conversational preferences of females.

Sybil considered it a rather tidy piece of social engineering. Her mother, had she noticed, would have no doubt been impressed with the skill if not the substance.

When the dinner had been cleared away and the women ushered into the parlor so that the men could enjoy the ritual of after-dinner cigars and port, Sybil felt herself growing bored with the tedium of feminine conversation. Gowns and gossip only held her attention for a severely limited amount of time, and there were now women at attendance at this particular dinner whose sympathies for Sybil’s political opinions or artistic endeavors could be trusted.

She circulated around the room for just as long as necessary as was polite, and then found an opportunity to excuse herself from social conversation and retreat to the family quarters and return to the series of drawings she had been working on that afternoon, based on a recent visit to Grantham village, where she had been able to sit in the green for an delicious two hours and sketch undisturbed.

The folio of drawing paper was not in the library, where she remembered abandoning it earlier in the day. One of the servants, perhaps Gwen (Sybil pictured the soft copper hair illuminated in the afternoon sunlight), must have discovered it and return the book to its usual place in the old schoolroom, now no longer employed for instruction, that Sybil had quietly suborned as a studio. It was the sort of thing Gwen would think to do.

The schoolroom was up on the third floor along the largely disused East Wing. Although electric lights had been installed along the passage, as they had throughout the house, Sybil knew her way in the dark and out of habit moved quickly and silently through the gloom.

She turned the final corner in haste, her mind already occupied by her plans for the completed charcoal and watercolor scene, and came to a sudden halt. There was unexpected movement at the end of the dim corridor: Two men pressed up against the wall by the door to one of the guest bedrooms. The door was slightly ajar, letting enough light into the hall for her to identify Thomas the footman and Dr. Clarkson from Grantham, whom she had last seen sitting at the table in the dining room, sherry glass in hand. He had been seated, she thought numbly, across the table from her during supper, next to her sister Edith. He had remarked upon the color of her new watered silk, how it complemented her eyes.

Dr. Clarkson was obviously not interested in her eyes at the moment. In fact, she surmised, he was interested in little else except the man he had backed against the door frame. He had Thomas pinned quite effectively, one hand (his left, the one Sybil could see) positioned just above Thomas’s right shoulder and his right hand, the one obscured by the two twining bodies, caught between them.

They were kissing, mouths open and frantic, almost violent. A crumpled jacket lay on the floor. Their white shirts glowed in the dark hallway, rucked up and half undone.

One of them, she couldn’t tell who, made a _sound_. A sound that said, without words she could recognize, “I _want_ you.” Not in the soft, affectionate way that she was used to associating with kissing couples (though the part of her brain that was still forming actual words pointed out that she had never been witness to a kiss quite like _that_ ). This was a sound that said: “I want you. Here. On this floor. I don’t care if there are witnesses, I am beyond caring. I want you naked, your hands hot on my skin. I want you. Now.”

Sybil backed up, retreating around the corner from whence she had come, and stood breathing open-mouthed for a moment or two. Her pulse, she noted in a distant way, was racing. Her skin felt hot all over, the fabric of her silk dress and underclothes almost unbearable against her over-sensitized breasts and belly and thighs.

She stumbled, as silently as possible (though she knew the two men in the hall were beyond hearing), _away_. Not really paying attention to where she was going.

Which was how she ended up at the door to her sister Mary’s room when Gwen came out with a basin in her hands and a towel over one arm.

“Oh!” Sybil let out a small gasp of surprise.

“Milady.” Gwen dipped her head in acknowledgment, holding her hands steady. Then: “Lady Sybil, begging your pardon but is there something wrong?”

“I--” Sybil gazed at Gwen. “I -- Thomas. He --”

“He’s not done something to you, has he?” Gwen’s spine straightened and her eyes widened, then narrowed, in what Sybil knew was Gwen’s restrained version of indignation bordering on outrage. “If he has, I’ll--”

“No, I-- He--” Sybil found herself mesmerized by the way the lamp in the hall cast a halo of amber light around Gwen’s hair, and the way Gwen’s indignation had caused her cheeks to flush in white and pink blotches.

“He and Dr. Clarkson. I went looking for my drawing paper in the schoolroom. They were – occupied.” She cleared her throat and blinked. Managed to look Gwen in the eye. “They didn’t realize I was there. Thomas hasn’t done anything to me, Gwen.”

She paused.

“In fact, I should say that after tonight I shall feel much safer in his company than I ever have.”

“Oh?” Gwen managed to make the syllable both an acknowledgment and an appraisal. Her eyebrow jumped slightly and her mouth twitched. “It’s like that then, is it.”

“Like that, yes.” Though what, and how, Sybil still felt unsure.

The two women stood for the space of a breath or two. Gwen didn't break eye contact at first. Then, without moving a single muscle, she ran her eyes very slowly up and down Sybil’s body, taking in every curve of silk and skin, pausing at the dip of cloth at Sybil’s neck, the curve of her neck, the fall of her hair across her shoulders. Sybil shivered. Dozens of times before, Gwen had assisted Anna in dressing the girls for dinner and Sybil had never consciously associated the sensuality of that experience -- the anticipation with which she looked forward such an eventuality, the near-painful sensitivity of her skin, the hardening of nipples and tightening of other parts -- with a raw, needy grappling desire of the sort she had just seen outside the schoolroom. Yet suddenly, it was as if the final piece of a complex puzzle were located and dropped into place.

* * *

The contours of her own body, and the sensations she can draw from them, are not a mystery to Sybil.

Sometimes she watches her mother, or Mary, or Edith, dressing, undressing, brushing their hair, preparing for a bath, and wonders whether they, too, do as she does: slipping fingers down between their legs, parting the damp curls to stroke the hot, silken skin beneath. It seems inexplicable that they would _not_ do this. And yet neither can she picture any of them _in extremis_ this way: legs splayed, fingers damp, body arched against the pillows.

Either way, they never speak of it.

Sybil herself cannot remember a time when she did _not_ soothe herself into sleep by tugging and stroking at the soft, damp warmth between her legs, running her fingers through the coarse black hairs that tangle and protect her unbearably sensitive portions. Nor can she identify precisely when such unconscious, calming motions gave way to more deliberate, and far from calming, explorations.

Suffice to say that, by the night on which she flees from the assignation in the hall, by the night upon which that spark of mutual recognition between herself and Gwen Hastings stirs and bursts into fully-acknowledged lust, Sybil has a fairly intimate and detailed understanding of what, exactly, her body is capable of.

It is just that, until that moment in the hall when she found herself confronted by the material fact of two men wrapped around each other, making the noises she herself has made in solitude, she had not considered the possibility that such a combination of bodies would be possible.

She had assumed, as she imagined all of the women in her world assumed, that in order to excite that sort of feeling one must naturally be in the company of a person whose intimate parts were, well, designed in such a way as to compliment one’s own.

She had assumed that the fantasies of curving hips and pendant breasts, soft thighs and warm inner cavities were simply due to familiarity with her own form. Her only experience of the male form was from engravings in books of classical literature, and marble statues in museums. The men’s bodies had all looked cold and hard (they were statues after all!) and while she had not allowed her gaze to linger on the shadowed bits between their legs, she had turned them over in her mind later and puzzled as to their attraction to women.

She had tried in earnest to picture them when she slid her hands between her legs lying in bed late at night, or in warm waters of her bath. But such images did nothing to kindle desire inside of her, nothing to further the building pressure at her core while her fingers worked ever-faster across the beating pulse point below the inky tangles of hair at her groin.

The night she leaves Gwen in the hallway, Sybil suddenly feels the answer to this riddle is so obvious it is shameful she has failed to see it before. And she is just as suddenly aching, trembling, to test her theory out. She is panting, her heart beating against the prison of her stays. The thought of returning to the after-dinner party is utterly impossible to contemplate.

She makes her way across the house to her own suite of rooms in the East Wing. Someone (Gwen?) has laid a fire. The room is warm. Almost too warm, given Sybil’s state of agitation. She locks the door behind her, laying the key on the dressing table. Stands for a moment by the bed, lifting her heavy skirts and undoing the clips and ties that hold her stockings in place. She will not be able to undo the dress alone (she really _must_ insist that Cynthia send her the promised patterns for her modified walking costumes) but she can remove enough under layers so that her fingers can connect.

Her nipples are painfully hard, pressing against the confines of her underclothes. She reaches up with one hand, dips her fingers below the edge of her bodice, locates the nipple and twists. The feeling goes straight to her groin and she lets out an involuntary moan.

For the first time, she allows herself to wonder whether Gwen Hastings ever touches herself like this, in the darkness of the garret room she shares with Anna, stealthily, beneath the covers.

Sybil slides a hand up her own thigh, eyes tight shut, imagining the fingers imprisoning her nipple and the hand stroking her thigh are not her own, but Gwen’s.

She is already wet, so wet. She hadn’t been conscious of how wet, at first. But as Gwen ran her gaze unabashedly over Sybil’s body, Sybil had felt the gathering moisture. Moisture that began seeping down her legs as she made her way back to the privacy of her room.

“Gwen--” She whispers, testing the name on her tongue.

Suddenly she cannot stand any longer. Crawling onto the bed, she collapses on her back, the acres of cloth of her skirt falling around her legs and hips. She pushes them impatiently away, exposing her wet thighs and the heat between them to the open air. As always, when she does this without the cover of darkness or the shroud of the bedclothes, her nakedness alarms her: parts of her body so shamelessly exposed, unprotected by cloth or darkness. Alarms and excites her. She imagines, in that moment, another being – _Gwen_ – gazing down at her _there_ as Gwen gazed at her minutes before. That look full of _want_ and _need_.

Her fingers are moving faster now, her hips pressing down into the bed, straining frantically to both escape and increase the intensity of feeling. She spreads her legs wider, needing more – more _something_. She can feel the emptiness at her very core, growing wider, hungrier. She wants Gwen there, between her knees, filling that emptiness as she knows, intuitively, Gwen would be able to.

And then suddenly, she has found the point of clarity. Her body goes rigid, back arched up off the bed, toes flexed and head thrown back so that – for just a moment – the only anchors that exist between her body and the room that surrounds her are her heels and the crown of her head.

Just as suddenly, it is over. And she is dissolved, melting into the coverlet in a pool of sweat and other fluids. Heart pounding faster than a frightened sparrow and then slowing to a slow, elongated _thrum_. Her breath is lazy, almost forgotten. Dazed, she runs a sticky hand across her forehead, wondering how to make herself presentable _enough_ to call for a maid to help her undress.

Perhaps – just perhaps – that maid will be Gwen.

* * *

Two weeks, three days, and seven hours (she would later calculate in her diary, which she kept in self-taught Latin, locked away from Edith’s prying eyes in her sitting room escritoire) after the night when she had seen Dr. Clarkson kissing Thomas, Sybil finally finds the courage and opportunity to make the next move.

It would have taken her less time, but for the fact that she and Gwen never seemed to have a moment alone, without fear of sudden and unannounced intrusion.

Never had she been so conscious of the lack of privacy at Downton.

Never had she been so aware of the way in which Gwen orbited her when they were in the same room. Or the way in which she orbited Gwen.

The family had been scheduled to attend a _soirée_ in honor of the new hospital opening in Grantham. Sybil, who had caught cold earlier in the week, found herself with a terrible headache when she and Mary returned from a long ride before tea.

“You can’t possibly go, my dear,” her mother had insisted, when she came up to Sybil’s room in the late afternoon to find her youngest daughter in bed with a damp cloth across her eyes. “I shall send one of the maids in to keep you company. I will tell Anna to send for Dr. Clarkson if it grows worse.”

Sybil nodded, then wished she hadn’t. Her mother left. And then everything faded out for some time, as she dozed. Cool hands were at her temple, occasionally turning the damp cloth that covered her burning eyes. Voices murmured in the background. One of them was Gwen.

She wished she were well enough to appreciate the fact that Gwen had her hands so close to Sybil’s nearly-naked form.

And then she slept.

When she woke, it was fully dark. The headache was gone. She pulled the damp rag off her face and peered into the gloom beside her bed.

Gwen was sitting in a chair, reading by the light of a flickering kerosene lamp. The lamplight cast warm shadows across her face and the worn cotton nightgown which she was wearing, covered over with a thick woolen shawl to keep out the chill of the late June evening.

Sybil shivered, conscious of how few layers of cloth lay between them.

Gwen looked up. “Your headache, Lady Sybil?”

“Better.” Sybil licked her lips. Her heart was pounding. “Could you check to see if I have a fever? My mother was particularly anxious.”

Gwen closed the book she had been reading – _North and South_ by Elizabeth Gaskell – and set it aside on the bedside table. She stood up and came to the bed, sat down on the edge of the mattress and leaned over to test Sybil’s forehead.

She leaned in close. Far closer than she had to in order to feel for signs of fever.

Sybil sucked in a breath. Gwen blinked at her, face devoid of expression.

“No fever,” she said, moving her hand from Sybil’s forehead and placing it on the pillow beside her shoulder. She seemed to be waiting, not moving away but not moving closer.

Sybil licked her lips. She could feel Gwen’s hip pressed against her own through the bedclothes. Her nearness was overwhelming. She –

“I think I may kiss you,” she said suddenly, hearing the surprise in her own voice. And she did, lifting her neck off the pillow, meeting Gwen’s lips with her own.

There was a pause, in which neither of the two women moved. And then suddenly Gwen gave a little sigh, a release of tension, and her lips open, warm wet air huffing out, followed by the barest flick of her tongue. Sybil surged forward into the kiss, reaching up and wrapping her hands around the other girl’s neck, feeling the press of Gwen’s breasts against her own chest.

* * *

When they break apart, panting, Sybil feels that hours must have passed between _then_ and _now_. That _now_ is, in fact, some new location entirely. Removed from her previous life, a life in which she and Gwen had never kissed or touched in such a way, a life in which such actions would have seemed impossible, shocking, daringly illicit rather than essential. Rather than an activity woven into the very fabric of her life.

Sybil is still tucked beneath the bedclothes, though she has pulled herself up to lean against the headboard, and somehow the first two buttons of her nightgown have come undone. The thin muslin of the cloth feels too heavy against her fever-hot skin. She is conscious of the way her nipples can be seen, rock hard against the fabric, the dark areole visible through the cloth.

Gwen has followed her up the bed, knees on the coverlet, hair tumbling out of its sensible braid and frizzing around her flushed face. Her eyes are bright, her lips swollen and red from the suction of Sybil’s mouth.

“Stay.” The word is out of her mouth before Sybil can think about what she is doing. A luxury, she knows, only she of the two of them can enjoy.

“Let me just stir the coals fire for you, Lady Sybil. Sybil.” Gwen corrects herself distractedly, hands plucking at the knit shawl at her shoulders. “Then, seeing as you’re feeling so much … better,” here a smile twitches briefly at the corner of her mouth, a flash of the self-assured and defiant Gwen that Sybil has grown accustomed to, “I should be leaving you. They’ll be looking for you at breakfast in three hours time.” She swallows against the heat thick between them. The room feels close, the air heavy, as if the fire had been raging all night instead of the window open to the night air.

Gwen’s throat convulses in the light of the oil lamp.

Sybil watches as the other woman moves from bed to hearth, kneels before the great and expertly turns the coals, adding several lumps from the scuttle. Sparks dance, outlining the cascade of red hair tumbling over Gwen’s shoulder in gold. Sybil closes her eyes against the vision: _she must stop_. Youthful indiscretion on the part of a third daughter was forgivable. Rumors about the perverted desires of a servant? Particularly a young woman with dreams of leaving service to work as a secretary? Impossible to repair. It is selfish of her to want _this much_ a thing that could ruin Gwen’s future.

Her fingers curl into the bedclothes, remembering the coarse warmth of Gwen’s hair when she had threaded her fingers into the curls at the base of her neck, learning into their embrace.

Gwen stands, slowly, as if in pain. There is a long silence as she looks into the fire, her back to Sybil. Sybil, on the bed, watches her. _This moment_ , she thinks, _this moment is every moment in which I have truly_ looked at _her in the past seven years. Seven years made up of two thousand five hundred fifty-five days made up of sixty-one thousand three hundred and twenty hours made up of one million four hundred seventy-one thousand six hundred and eighty minutes made up of eighty-eight million three hundred thousand eight hundred seconds during which I have_ taken note _of her. Wanted her. Loved her._

She could try, she thinks in panic, to _order_ Gwen to stay. But she knows (finds strange comfort in the knowledge) that Gwen would not obey. That whatever fragile possibility exists between them now would flare up hot and die if “Sybil” retreated once more to being “Lady Sybil.” That the delicate equilibrium would shift between them if the power to say “yes, yes _please_ ” and “no” in equal measure were brushed aside. And that Sybil would be the one who killed it.

She bites her tongue and tastes blood. A whimper – of longing, of love, of lust – rises unchoreographed from her chest.

Gwen will walk away now, she thinks, without looking back. And they will return to – to the way life had been _before_. And never speak of it again.

Gwen’s shawl falls to the floor in a near-silent huff of displaced air.

Sybil stops breathing altogether.

Gwen’s hands move deliberately, with that spatially-awkward, familiar steadiness that Sybil has come to see as grace. Apart from her hands, she stands straight and still, unmoving, her eyes on the flickering light behind the grate.

“Three hours until breakfast.” She says it almost brightly, her fingers undoing (Sybil feels herself spasm at the thought) the shell buttons of her nightdress one by one by one.

“Yes.” Sybil manages to agree with this statement, though her voice feels forced up through a throat thick with desire.

“Two hours until them below-stairs begin their morning rounds.” Another button undone. Then another.

“Yes.” Sybil breathes, uncertain Gwen can hear her.

“If Anna asks I can say the headache grew worse, turned to a fever. I was afraid to leave you.” Her voice is hypnotic.

“Afraid,” Sybil echoes. Suddenly, it is she who is afraid: is it possible that Gwen is prepared to give her exactly what Sybil has finally realized she wants? What if – what if she fumbles it? What if she panics, as her sister Mary did with the dreadful Turkish ambassador and – she can’t bring herself to think the word “die” – and _hurts_ Gwen in some way?

Gwen turns, finally, from the fire. Her slender form silhouetted in the flickering light. Her fingers are on the last button of her nightdress, which she plucks open with a deft twist. Then, in one gangling motion that manages to be both awkward and graceful at once, Gwen sweeps the garment over her head and drops it on the floor.

Sybil finds she has rocked forward without thinking, is on her hands and knees halfway down the bed, an inchoate expression of yearning on her lips. Gwen meets her at the foot of the bed where Sybil finds that they are perfectly matched in height if she rises to her knees. Her hands, before she can consciously place them, come to rest – anchor her – against Gwen’s breasts. They are hot to the touch, from Gwen’s recent proximity to the fire, the nipples hard against the sensitive skin on Sybil’s palms.

“Gwen--” Sybil tries. Finds her mouth is dry. Licks her lips.

“Shush.” Gwen leans into Sybil s hands, the flesh of her breasts rising up against Sybil’s fingers, as if Sybil’s hands are stays against which she is straining to breathe. “Shush, now. They can’t find us. They won’t be able to stop us.” The hesitation from before, the shadow of anxiety, has gone. The Gwen who bends the bounds of social expectation to suit her own ends has returned.

Sybil is thrilled to have her there, but also – the portion of her brain that isn’t screaming to have Gwen back under her hands _now_ with a force that frightens her a bit in its intensity (touching herself in that way never felt quite like _this_ – the rational, almost-adult portion of her brain is aware that of the two of them, Gwen risks so much _more_ for herself than does Sybil.

“Gwen, I cannot ask you to – your position–”

“Not to disrespect my betters, milady,” Gwen whispers, leaning in so that Sybil can feel Gwen’s breath against her cheek, “but instead of assuming what you can and cannot ask, perhaps you should simply … ask. Ask me what do I want and what I am willing to risk for it.”

“What _do_ you – want?” Sybil manages to gasp out, as Gwen’s hands reach up between her own and begin to undo the buttons at Sybil’s throat. Her movements are not awkward at all now.

“You.”

Sybil moans, leaning into Gwen’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of cheap soap, coal dust, sweat, the kitchens, and a musk that is Gwen’s alone. Sybil thinks that now she has smelled it, taken note of it, that scent is forever imprinted on her senses.

She would be able to find Gwen unerringly now by scent alone.

“What are you willing to risk?” She whispers, hands spasming against the other woman’s chest, seeking closer contact. Gwen’s hands, rough from work, slipped inside the placket of her nightgown, skated across Sybil’s collarbone.

“I should ask you the same, ‘my lady.’” Gwen manages to make her title sound simultaneously like a filthy insult and a loving endearment.

Sybil shivers. “My reputation. My inheritance. We could leave this place and run far, far away.”

Gwen slides a knee onto the bed, her thigh between Sybil’s legs, pressing the cloth of her nightgown tight. Sybil can feel the wetness between her legs – moisture that has, she realizes with a blush, been accumulating from the moment Gwen walked through her bedroom door. The damp soaks eagerly into her gown. She can see in Gwen’s eyes that she feels the spread of the wet warmth against her leg where she’s pressed up against Sybil’s folds.

Gwen is shaking her head. “We won’t leave ‘til we’re ready. We leave on our own terms.” She runs her hands confidently across Sybil’s shoulders and down her back. Grips her arse, pulling her taut at the crease, spreading Sybil wide. Once again Sybil moans, muting the sound against Gwen’s shoulder. Her skin is salty to the taste. Sybil sucks hard, rocking forward, pressing herself down against the grip of Gwen’s hands and the inexorable press of her leg at what is rapidly becoming the center-point of Sybil’s consciousness.

Gwen gives a soft moan of her own, digs her fingers into Sybil’s thighs. Then she pulls back and, in one swift motion that mirrors her action on the hearth rug, she has yanked Sybil’s gown up and over her head, roughly.

All is suddenly nakedness and heat. Gwen is pushing Sybil back against the eiderdown comforter, her hands gripping Sybil’s wrists, holding her spread-eagle, pinned, exposed. Her eyes are hungry. Sybil knows that the predatory look on Gwen’s face is mirrored in her own, and this knowledge causes her to buck beneath the other woman: she wants to be _closer_. She arches her back to meet Gwen’s mouth as warm, wet lips are lowered beneath a curtain of red hair to latch onto Sybil’s left nipple. Lips part for teeth and tongue, first delicately tracing the sensitive tip of the nipple as it grows erect, then as Sybil gasps inarticulate sounds of pure _want_ the mouth opens wider to take in more, teeth nipping and pulling, lips sucking.

Oh, dear merciful Lord in heaven, Sybil has never realized her breasts could feel this way, that they were connected quite so unalterably to that place between her legs. Gwen’s mouth suckling there was causing her to swell even further. She could feel herself seeping down along Gwen’s leg, leaving moisture from hipbone to knee as she moved her hips in concert Gwen who – she realized hazily – was rocking her own pelvis back and forth, working her knee down toward Sybil’s tailbone. As her mouth works down around Sybil’s nipple, her hands convulse where they’re wrapped around the bones of Sybil’s wrists and her thighs scissor around Sybil’s own right hip, her pelvis grinding down. Sybil feels the heat of Gwen unfolding against her skin, a bloom of wetness and the rough tangle of Gwen’s russet curls drawing out sensations from a part of her body she has until now never associated with erotic pleasure.

“Gwen--” She gasps, part identification, part benediction. She needs to anchor this moment with the reality of the flesh and blood person whose body is above her, overpowering her in a way she never imagined the slight woman capable of.

Gwen responds instantly, breaking the contact of mouth on nipple and straightening her spine in order to fall full-length against Sybil’s side, rolling the younger woman against her and pulling her into a kiss.

Hot, insistent lips and tongue fill Sybil’s consciousness. She responds, opening her mouth and twining her tongue with Gwen’s, exploring the other woman’s uneven front teeth, the slight gap between her first and second incisors. “Oh, God oh God oh God--” Sybil has been subsisting, she realizes now, off the fantasy of that single stolen kiss. That moment, which has fueled so many fantasies in the past three weeks, was a ghost of the full possibilities entailed in the coming together of two mouths and lips and teeth.

For long minutes, there can only be kissing. Dimly, Sybil is aware that both she and Gwen have begun to make noises not unlike the sound she heard coming from Thomas’s throat that fateful night in the East Wing. She is aware, on some level, for the imperative for discretion, though the effort of remembering why is beyond her. She needs to be _closer_ and all impediments to this prerogative, including skin, are a frustration against which she must vocalize her displeasure, her need.

Eventually, they roll away from one another in a haze of sweat and other bodily fluids, dazed and panting.

“Why--” gasps Sybil, “Why didn’t we do this _months_ ago?”

“I have absolutely no idea.” Gwen returns, rolling back toward Sybil and – with absolutely no warning or hesitation – slides her first and middle fingers home.

* * *

The unexpected, utterly foreign, and at the same time utterly _right_ feeling of Gwen _inside_ her causes Sybil’s body to arch off the mattress, the movement opening her body and giving Gwen the opportunity to push deeper.

Sybil groans, a hand flying out blindly for something to grip. Gwen’s free hand catch and grasps it tightly. She leans over and captures Sybil’s mouth with her own, muffling the involuntary noises that Sybil is starting to make as Gwen curls her fingers, the tips pulling rhythmically against the soft interior walls of Sybil’s opening, slick with arousal.

Her lips are warm and wet, they part and an even warmer tongue presses into Sybil’s open mouth. She surges upward, struggling for breath yet not wanting to break away – instead pressing closer, deeper. Her senses have narrowed to the two points of exquisite contact: Gwen’s lips and tongue and teeth on her mouth and Gwen’s fingers rocking in and out of her as Sybil’s hips move urgently against the hand that has so decisively pinioned her to the bed.

Gwen _hummmms_ against her lips, mouth and chest vibrating slightly from an excess of pleasure.

A third finger joins the first two, pulling her even wider. Wider than Sybil had ever imagined possible, and yet her body still feels empty.

She wimpers, muscles clenching, wanting Gwen closer, deeper.

“Shush!” Gwen is laughing softly, eyes bright in the light of the fire and the flicker of the lamp. “We’ve got to be quiet. You greedy thing. Still wanting more?” She twists her fingers gently, maneuvering, positioning, then folds her pinky finger into place and presses in.

Sybil rolls toward Gwen, pushing down onto the hand working its way inside her, and finds herself suddenly on her knees, straddling Gwen, legs wide, staring down at the naked woman below her whose right hand disappears between them, to the place of joining. She grasps the exposed wrist and thrusts downward, pulling Gwen toward her, pressing the ball of her hand against the aching pulse point above where Gwen’s fingers disappear inside her.

Gwen rocks forward, off the bed, until she is sitting upright with Sybil straddling her lap, the two of them wrapped together mouth to mouth and groin to groin. Sybil’s hand fumbles around the tangle of limbs and slips – oh! – into the warmth between Gwen’s legs, parting the coarse hair and slippery folds, questing for the particular spot she knows from her own experience will be there.

Just so.

Gwen gasps, her whole body shuddering around Sybil, and suddenly Sybil’s attention shifts from the sensation of Gwen inside her own body to the thrill of response her body gives to Gwen’s physical response. Shaking with need, she presses her advantage, rubbing wet fingers up and down, pressing and squeezing and rubbing.

Gwen’s hand slides out of Sybil and she falls back against the pillows, flinging her arms up to grip the bedstead. Anchoring herself, she begins to rock against Gwen’s obliging hand, adjusting, pressing, lost in the motion.

“Please,” she’s chanting under her breath, “pleasepleaseplease _please_.”

Sybil leans over her, lengthening her torso so that her belly and breasts press alongside her lover’s body, stretched taught along the bed. Gwen is sweating, despite the chill of the early morning hour: her temples are beaded with sweat, darkening her ginger hair to a deep mahogany, and sweat is gathering in the hallow between her breasts.

Sybil is fascinated by the proximity of this other body, like her own in so many ways and yet utterly alien. Unbreachable in its foreignness.

She flicks out a tongue and licks along Gwen’s temple, from the base of her ear to where her hair falls away from its parting down the center of her skull.

Gwen shivers, despite the heat coming off of her in waves.

“What,” Sybil asks in tightly controlled voice (though she can feel the racing of her heart in her throat), “Do you want.”

“Please. I don’t know. Oh. Please. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” Gwen hasn’t stopped rocking, pressing herself hard against Sybil’s hand, so that Sybil’s fingers are hard against bone, the soft, slippery bits caught tight between the flesh of one body and another. “Oh God, oh _God!_ ”

And with this, Gwen arches back into the pillows, all but the crown of her head and the heels of her feet rising up off the mattress, knuckles going white around the spindles at the head of the bed.

For a moment, even two, she has stopped breathing.

Sybil’s breath ceases with hers, and there is silence.

Fingers against flesh.

Two hearts beating.

And then, slowly: Sybil feels Gwen’s rigid form fold in on itself, collapsing back into the mattress. Because her face is pressed against Gwen’s flushed face she feels her begin to breathe again. One breath; two. Her heart, beneath Sybil’s fingers, preternaturally slow – a startling (though not wholly unexpected) contrast from its sparrow-fast speed mere seconds before.

* * *

Sybil slowly grows aware of her own skin again in the silence that stretches out moment to moment, accumulating into minutes.

She becomes aware of the sound of a bird, far away, that has woken and begun to sing.

Dawn will come soon, and with it the house will stir.

Soon, they should part.

Gwen stirs, opens her eyes lazily and turns her head slightly to meet Sybil’s gaze. The corners of her mouth turn up ever so slightly: as much of a smile as her body can manage. And yet it lights up her eyes such that questions need not be asked.

As if Sybil had harbored any doubt.

Well, perhaps, just a little. Gwen is her first, after all, in this new experiment in geometry she is attempting. It was conceivable that what might go together in theory would not, in fact, come together quite so seamlessly in the material world.

Yet this smile, and what comes after erase any lingering doubt from her mind. For Gwen’s hand reaches across the plain of her belly and cups Sybil’s exposed breast, which has come to rest against Gwen’s own chest.

Sybil is immediately aware that the nipple, for all the lack of direct attention she has paid it in the last quarter of an hour, is still painfully hard.

She draws a sharp breath.

Gwen laughs, almost sleepily.

“You didn’t think I’d forget about you, did you?” She asks, arching a brow.

“I--” Sybil blushes, “Honestly, I hadn’t thought—”

Gwen rolls toward her, pinching the hardened nipple between thumb and forefinger, pressing her hand firmly against Sybil’s bosom. Sybil’s words end in a small gasp as the pain, not unpleasant, reminds her of other sensitive portions, still heavy and damp and ever-so-slightly sore from earlier activities.

She lets her head and shoulders roll back against the rumpled pillow with a sigh and closes her eyes as Gwen dips her head and takes her newly-exposed left nipple between her teeth, nipping and lapping at it gently, yet firmly, while her fingers continue to finger the right nipple, pulling, pinching, pressing.

“Mmmm.” Sybil lets her appreciation vibrate in the back of her throat.

The lips against her breast vibrate back, as Gwen stifles a warm laugh.

“See. How could I forget _this._ ” She whispers against Sybil’s skin, letting go of the roughly-used nipple – Sybil wimpers in protest – and sliding her palm with firm confidence down the length of Sybil’s torso, across her hipbone, and then – oh, then – down through soaking raven curls to find the swollen point still so sensitive to the touch that Sybil gasps and jerks away when Gwen’s fingers find it.

Gwen stills. Then shifts her hand slightly, beginning to draw well-lubricated fingers in slow, firm, elliptical motions up and down and up and down and up and down, circling but never actually touching the place where Sybil’s pulse is throbbing painfully against her skin.

Sybil spreads her thighs, tilting her hips _just so_ encouraging Gwen’s movements toward the edge of what feels, in the moment, line pain and like ecstasy.

She can feel herself drawing close to the precipice.

“Yes. Like that.” She whispers, eyes fluttering shut, hands fisting into the sheets.

“I’ve dreamed about doing this, you know,” Gwen whispers against her ear. The tone is almost conversational, but also carries an intensity in it that causes Sybil’s whole body to shiver. It’s her turn to break out in a sweat, she realizes, her exposed skin a damp sheen in the early morning light.

“No!” She gasps, “I didn’t. Tell me.”

“Sometimes,” Gwen continues, punctuating her words with her methodical fingers. “Sometimes I wake up in the dormer drenched in sweat, from a dream just like this. You: naked. Me: pressed against you. My hands working the slick folds just— _here_ ,”

Sybil gasped.

“—drawing moisture from deep within you as you writhe beneath my hands.”

Her fingers were moving imperceptibly faster. How in heaven, Sybil wonders dazedly, had Gwen learned to do this? This wicked choreography of hands and voice and, yes, _tongue_ which was just now darting out to caress the shell of her ear as delicate as the fingers below were forceful.

Sybil concentrates on breathing.

“Have you dreamed of this too?”

“Yes! Oh, _God_ yes. Please!”

“You’ve woken wet and heavy and aching with need, your hands between your legs even before you’re quite conscious, imagining it was me pressed against you, _just so--”_

Sybil feels it rising up within her: that mysterious and delicious nerve-splitting sensation so like pain and yet wholly opposite. Demanding. Consuming. Flooding into every nerve ending in her body and pulling her taught as a bowstring, her body going as rigid beneath Gwen’s steadying hands as Gwen’s form had gone beneath her's such a brief time before.

And then all sensation vanishes, and she is left suspended for a moment, then two, in nothingness. Beyond hearing, beyond seeing, beyond touch. All that remains are her ravaged nerves and the knowledge that Gwen is close by, keeping her safe.

With a slow, seemingly endless sigh she sinks back to the bed, against Gwen’s waiting breast.

And sleeps.

* * *

The boundless sense of intimacy. The rush of sensation followed by the still unity of heartbeats as they doze lightly in each others' arms. The smell of each others' sticky sex smeared across their skin, a smell that will linger under her fingernails despite the long lingering path she takes the following afternoon. 

 _This_ will be what Sybil remembers at the breakfast table the following morning, and many mornings thereafter.

 _This_ will be what others fail to see.

Until it is too late, and she and Gwen have gone.


End file.
